American Scholar articles from January 2001

American Scholar archives from January 2001

Too Close to Call.(magazine's award to best published essay)(Brief Article)
January 1, 2001... Our staff recently learned that the SCHOLAR has won the Utne Reader's Alternative Press Award for Writing Excellence for the second year in a row. (The first time around, I got a subversive thrill just from having been considered a member of...

AT LARGE AND AT SMALL.(narrative on transition from city to country life)
January 1, 2001... Moving From time to time, after we decided to move from New York City to western Massachusetts, my mind came to rest on the dispiriting example of James Montgomery Whitmore, my great-great-grandfather. Whitmore was a Mormon convert who...

COMMONPLACE BOOK.(brief book excerpts)
January 1, 2001... Transitions Autumn leaf fires. The cook is drunk. Children make a barricade of leaves. Frost has slaughtered the begonias. -- JOHN CHEEVER, Journals, 1966 Time is to clock as mind is to brain. The clock or watch somehow contains...

The End of Linguistics.(academic and social attitudes towards evolution of language)(Critical Essay)
January 1, 2001... Taking the Language Back from Nature--and Linguists There is only one thing everyone knows about language--that it's a living, growing thing--so it seems particularly unfortunate that the notion should be false. This metaphor may once have...

In Defense of Fainting.
January 1, 2001... It's happened any number of times and in any number of unfortunate places, but the one that comes first to mind was during my freshman year at a small college in upstate New York, in October 1971. We all had a science requirement to fulfill,...

Still Life, with Her Things.(Poem)
January 1, 2001... Today her things are quiet and do not reproach, each in its place, washed in the light that encouraged the Dutch to paint objects as though they were grace-- the bowl, the goblet, the vase from...

Tired Blood.(Poem)
January 1, 2001... Well, not tired so much as freighted. As though foreign objects had invaded. As though tiny offices had dumped their metal furniture among the glossy lozenges and platelets-- chairs that stick...

Winter Sun.(Poem)
January 1, 2001... Red blue red blue then black and white through the train window into my closed eyes. Open now, wide now. Moving right along. There, beyond the polished ice the waving water, tipped with light, there there,...

The Great Queen Died.(death and funeral of Queen Victoria and her influence on arts and society)(Critical Essay)
January 1, 2001... Humor, G. K. Chesterton announced unexpectedly in 1918, "is the last essential of the Victorian. Laugh at him as a limited man, a moralist, a conventionalist, an opportunist, a formalist. But remember also that he was really a humorist; and may...

Fragment.(Poem)
January 1, 2001... Fittingly "Fragment" is the first whole poem (on p. 23 of Pictures from Brueghel and other poems by William Carlos Williams) that remains intact. I found the remains this morning in a pine grove out back,...

Elvis Movies.(cinematographic performances of singer-actor Elvis Presley)(Critical Essay)
January 1, 2001... "We have to think of giving the maximum enjoyment to the maximum fans and the best way to do this is making films, which can be seen by millions." --Colonel `Tom Parker, Elvis Presley's manager, explaining to Brian Epstein, the Beatles'...

The Library of Robinson Crusoe.(references to books in literary work)(Critical Essay)
January 1, 2001... Iron-jointed, supple-sinew'd, they shall dive, and they shall run, Catch the wild goat by the hair, and hurl their lances in the sun; Whistle back the parrot's call, and leap the rainbows of the brooks, Not with blinded eyesight poring over...

A Long Time Between Murders.(present condition and sociological and economic changes in Wales)(Critical Essay)
January 1, 2001... For the last sixteen years I've lived in Washington, D.C., a city in which a half-dozen murders in the course of a weekend are not uncommon. For the first sixteen years of my life I lived in a community that witnessed only one murder in more...

Home from Bohemia.(Poem)
January 1, 2001... I'm home from Bohemia, bringing no crystal apple (all ill shaped, the colors wrong); no angel of apple wood (cute, but her flute too fragile to be packed); not a puppet, nor a pearl, nor anything of porcelain...

Missing Links.(considerations in writing of book about anthropologist Eugene Dubois)(Critical Essay)
January 1, 2001... A Scientist Reconstructs Biography I have always been intrigued by missing links. The factual pillars of knowledge are of less interest to me than the gaps between them, the spaces and the voids, the hidden connections. As my career has...

Soji-ji.(narrative about meditation course in Zen monastery)
January 1, 2001... It was cold and silent in the zendo. Bowing to the low platform along the wall, the place where I would sit, I slipped off my sandals and sank down, cross-legged, on the high black cushion. "No," whispered the young monk next to me. He grasped...

A Prudent Man.(Poem)
January 1, 2001... The fellow thought he had a limestone deposit in his gut. Daily he went to this doctor or that, each of whom would say: "Your urinalysis shows nothing," or else that he was on his way to decalcinization, or that he smoked too much, his nerves...

Getting Involved.(Poem)
January 1, 2001... Once I had too much respect for nature. I confronted objects and landscapes and I let them be. All that's behind me now. I mean to get involved. I found myself bored at Honfleur. So I deliberately kicked up some sand: I introduced a few...

My Statues.(Poem)
January 1, 2001... I have my statues, the centuries have given them to me, legacies: centuries of waiting, centuries of discouragement, centuries of vagueness and of my inextinguishable hope have fashioned them. Now they are simply there. As with any old...

Wigwam Words.
January 1, 2001... One gray day not long ago I walked across Harvard Yard and into the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, an aging brick building on the delightfully named Divinity Avenue. At the entrance to the Hall of the North American Indian, with...

How Does It Come Out?(wisdom and enjoyment to be found in popular sayings)
January 1, 2001... In 1937, when I was fifteen and in love with Ronald Colman, I saw The Prisoner of Zenda. During an elaborate dueling scene, as gracefully choreographed as an Astaire-Rogers dance number, Colman and his opponent fight their way around a gloomy...

In the Forum.
January 1, 2001... Nothing will make us present tense. Like an agora with nothing to sell, the past gives up its chips of marble, broken pediments, headless statues. No way of knowing whether the fragments are put together right, ...

A Voice (Up Comes).
January 1, 2001... Soon from the balcony I start to think I hear important things--I'm all swell and wane and wax--contagion--now I'm too simple for suspicion. Meanwhile murmuring, you've nothing more than slippage to report of...

Old Age and Frustration.
January 1, 2001... More than half a century ago, as a participant in a graduate research seminar, I undertook, in all innocence, a literature review on infant care. It appeared in a scholarly journal and became assigned reading in some child-development courses....

THE UNCERTAIN ART.(writing)
January 1, 2001... Writing I have never given much thought to the craft of writing. But nowadays it is impossible to have one's name on a book or two without being deluged with questions from well-meaning people wanting to know how it is done. I wish I had...

An Aborted Project.(planned biography of author Willa Cather)
January 1, 2001... In 1978 I began piling up boxes of 5x7 cards (the ancient way of taking notes) on Willa Cather. Four years later I received a book contract. These journal entries' begin with a visit to Cather's longtime publisher. September 8, 1982. Pub....

The Worldly Stendhal.
January 1, 2001... Stendhal first came into my life through the impassioned offices of Dr. Floyd Zulli. Improbable as it may sound to a younger generation, this professor with dark-rimmed glasses, a crew cut, and a zeal for world literature had mesmerized our...

THE COMPLETE LETTERS OF OSCAR WILDE.(Review)
January 1, 2001... THE COMPLETE LETTERS OF OSCAR WILDE Edited by Merlin Holland and Rupert Hart-Davis. Henry Holt. $45. On May 25, 1895, Oscar Wilde was sentenced to two years in prison for acts of gross indecency--for homosexuality. Ever since then, the...

HIGHLANDERS: A JOURNEY TO THE CAUCASUS IN QUEST OF MEMORY.(Review)
January 1, 2001... HIGHLANDERS: A JOURNEY TO THE CAUCASUS IN QUEST OF MEMORY By Yo'av Karny. Farrar, Strous & Giroux. $27. If Russia is, as Churchill famously remarked, "a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma," then the Caucasus--the...

BELLOW: A BIOGRAPHY.(Review)
January 1, 2001... BELLOW: A BIOGRAPHY By James Atlas. Random House. $35. James Atlas's long-awaited biography of Saul Bellow is at once indispensable and something of a disappointment--indispensable because of the mountains of new information it contains,...

WHERE MATHEMATICS COMES FROM.(Review)
January 1, 2001... WHERE MATHEMATICS COMES FROM By George Lakoff and Rafael Nunez. Basic Books. $30. Books on the philosophy of mathematics or mathematical pedagogy are frequently rather tiresome, rehashing standard positions and developing, if the reader is...

BHAGAVAD GITA: A NEW TRANSLATION.(Review)
January 1, 2001... BHAGAVAD GITA: A NEW TRANSLATION By Stephen Mitchell. Harmony Books. $20. If the Bhagavad Gita's relationship to its parent epic, the Mahabharata, sometimes appears strained, that is because Sanskrit literature snubs the Aristotelian...

THE READER REPLIES.(Letter to the Editor)
January 1, 2001... NARROW RULED As a woman addicted to generating commonplace books and precis collections for almost seventy years, I was delighted by Nicholson Baker's column "Narrow Ruled" (Autumn). I love being connected to Coleridge, who kept extensive...

CORRIGENDA.
January 1, 2001... In the Autumn 2000 issue, transcription errors resulted in two obviously wrong dates in "The Commonplace Book." Cicero died in 43 B.C., not 412 A.D.; Pliny the Elder died in 79 A.D., not 237 A.D. Please send letters to THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR,...

A Beastly Century.
January 1, 2001... Though beastly was his first recorded word, George Orwell found animals pleasanter than people. In 1984 he demonstrates that we may all be reduced to the lowest of acts: we become worse than rats. The gene is selfish, and the individual man is...